


disambiguation of destruction

by orphan_account



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, M/M, Mild Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-02
Updated: 2014-06-02
Packaged: 2018-02-03 03:03:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1728677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It should be simple, but they’ve constructed it into something entirely impossible and Bond’s in love with his Quartermaster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	disambiguation of destruction

**Author's Note:**

> Venus and Mars, Sandro Botticelli, exists in the National Gallery, Mars (god of war) asleep and unarmed and Venus (goddess of love) awake and alert. I got all this from the National Gallery website, I've never been.  
> Written in fragments, very self indulgent.

Q dreams of watching with burgeoning horror as the pixels come together and Bond is dying.

Shot in the chest, a misplaced bullet, he rocks back and forth on all fours, groaning because the body clings to life and pain, and there’s a growing stream of blood soaking into the sand.

The visual should be grainy. It’s not. Q might as well be standing over his body, hapless, with cold fingers and scalding tea soaking into his sleeves. There’s a strange, attenuated roaring in his ear, like he’s drowning in his own weltering blood.

Bond has five minutes, lost in the far-away bowels of sand dunes. Emergency services have five minutes, counting down. Q has five minutes. 

They won’t make it.

 

He wakes abruptly, throat dry and grit in his eyes like grains of sand. He adjusts his glasses.

 The lamp still burns, and the cursor blinks at him from the end of a stroke of code; he snaps his laptop closed as though that might make him cavalier but his throat is still dry, the ever-present ache at the base of his neck has intensified, and the nightmare plays fresh and forceful in his mind, on loop.

Light stabs like glass shards into his retinas so he flicks it off, blinks against the dark until shadows slide into focus and he can make his steady-paced way to the kitchen, nauseated though he is, and draw himself a glass of water, turning the lights above the sink appropriately dim. A sour-bitter taste coats his tongue and the water does nothing for it but he holds it in mouth and takes even sips between inhales, until he picks up that smell.

That heavy, crumbling smell insinuating into the kitchen. Q doesn't immediately pursue it, taking a moment to make certain of its actual presence, and no, he isn't imagining anything but he won’t allow himself to dash into tracking down the intruder – his throat is trying to close in on itself and Q has to remember how to breathe. Passing a hand through his rumpled hair, he swills down the rest of the water, and he shouldn't have, his stomach roils.

A silhouette is painted at a window, smoking Q’s brand of cigarettes. Q’s stomach roils again, as if railing against the association of the recognizable lines of Bond with himself, while the simulacrum of his failure plays over and over and over in his mind, and it isn't only a dream, it’s a _premonition_. He doesn't need to be clairvoyant to know disaster is waiting to happen, somewhere on the horizon.

How many times until Bond stops returning altogether?

Q forgets how to breathe, has to remember again and it takes glacial, dragging seconds. When he does, he finds a light switch and Bond shifts.  

“What’re you doing here?”

There’s a new scar, flaming red past his jaw and down his neck, into his stiff white collar, and the hard line of his mouth curls, eyes shaded dark and glinting.

“Reporting for duty”, he says, holds aloft a dark bottle by its neck. “Single malt for you.” He sets it on the mantle when Q doesn't move to take it.

“I don’t drink”, he tells Bond, and he’s taken him by surprise.

“Couldn't find a suitable enough apology in Scotland”, he says after a moment, lowering his brows, lowering himself onto the sofa. Q catches the way he tests his right foot because it’s just what he’s looking for, Bond catches him looking because it’s his job to do so. The makeshift ashtray, a lonely saucer, is at his disposal on the coffee table. Ash accumulates slowly between his fingers, cinder-glow when Bond moves them to his mouth and his eyes don’t leave Q.

He looks as though he’s immaculately held together with pins and wires, rigged to detonate.  

“You might want to start drinking, Q”, he says.

“No thank you. My equipment?”

“Saved my life on many occasions, thank you. Lost them, unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately.”

Maybe Bond’s gaze wavers, maybe Q imagines it. Bare feet, the parquet of the arched kitchen entrance is cold. They’re both keenly aware of the space between them.

Bond lets smoke drop, thick and white, then stubs it out, leans back into the tufting and drapes an arm across the back: all easy confidence.

“Won’t you say anything?”

“You’ve been off radar.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been looking for you.”

“Yes. I had a hunch.”

There’s a hot, itchy bloom inside his ribs like a scabbing wound. Q swallows to steady himself.

“You should probably go.”

“Sit down, Q. Sit down. I’ve been gone longer than four days before. You should know to expect me.”

Q means to plant his feet. He isn’t going to comply with this nonsense, he won't have it, but then he’s sat himself beside Bond, at a considerable distance, but nonetheless…

He’s failing, he’s going to fail, Bond is falling, free-fall and unstoppable and Q can’t slow his drop.

 _Their drop. Their._ Collective, because Bond’s got him by the scruff of his collar, the back of his neck, fingers sliding into his hair.

“You look like a bloody ghost,Q.”

“You are a complete and utter piece of shit, Bond.”

“There’s no need for invective. You’re only in a strop because I got myself home without you.” he says, urging Q to turn so that he sits sideways, crossed legged, and thumbs find the tension in his shoulders, in his neck, digging in. Bond leans close, bleeding warmth because his blood runs at a temperature hotter than the rest of them, straight from the embers and wielding into the war, scraping past injury with a handful of scars and something wrong with his right foot.

Caught amidst a string of explosions, Bond recklessly expects to survive, and he does, and he comes home, bearing scotch and a backrub, burning through Q’s stash as though nothing matters.

“I worry about you”, Bond says.

Maybe nothing does matter. Maybe the world won’t tilt on its axis, and Bond won’t bleed out into sand.

A dense exhaustion settles across him, as though he’s the one who got lost in some recesses of Scottish foothills, yet he feels oddly unmoored under Bond’s hands. It’s very suspicious, the way he’s suddenly drowsy.

“I’ve always been suspicious of you.”

“You _are_ smart.”

“And you’re everything but, getting caught with that envoy’s daughter.”

“All according to plan.”

“And those explosives, Bond?”

“Slight miscalculation.”

A rejoinder’s always ready but it dies in his throat because unexpectedly, Bond’s breathing warm in his ear. Then he’s hyper-aware of the heady alcohol, the smoke, heavy palms resting on either side of his neck.

(A slightly changed pressure, a quiet whim, and his spine could snap under those palms.)  

“I don’t die. It’ll do you good to remember,” Bond says, “Unless you have something to do with it, Q.”

Q doesn’t know when he leaves.

-                                                                                                                                                                                             

Q has Earl Grey going cold and a table next to a large glass window, London careening by.

He got caught in some snarls of nested loops, algorithms entwining into incoherence, zero readability in his sleep bereft brain, but it was the hunger pains that drove him out because his flat held nothing but a discarded box of weetabix and the pesky alcohol that keeps conjuring Bond to the forefront of his mind.

The morning light shifts – it’s not raining for once – and Q catches his ragged reflection. And like magic, a conjuring trick, he also catches Bond’s, seated beside him like a spectre.

“How long have you been there?”

“A while. You’ve been wool gathering.”

They don’t look at each other, Bond with his arms and ankles crossed, Q sipping quietly.

“It’s deplorable, how you do that,” he tells Bond.  

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Sliding around like a reflection. It makes you so dubious.”

 “You know what makes you dubious?”

“What?”

“That bloody cardigan.”

It makes him smile. “It’s perfectly comfortable.”

“Probably an explosive”

“You overestimate me, 007,” he says, because really, that section of his job is merely simple tinkering, simple mucking about with the physics and chemistry and mathematics of the world to help Britain take lives, for all the tea and tech he could wish for. Simple.

Bond is what’s taxing.

“Better safe than sorry”, Bond says, like _Q’s_ the buggering serial killer, and Q frowns down at the tea-dregs until Bond stands and jangles keys at him so that he has Q’s attention. Sun in his hair and the sky in his eyes; he’s taxing in every possible way.

“I’ve got my oyster card,” Q says, clearing his throat.  

“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve just had breakfast together.”

“Besides”, he continues, smooth on Q’s heels as they exit, “we don’t want the tube to go up in flames.”

-

Q gives him blades, a gun, an envelope. He gives him a smile when their hands brush, and Bond is set.

Another piffling mission, which stretches and drags thin until Bond isn’t sure what his objective is, but what’s more grating is his foot, giving him more trouble than it should. He reckons it’s the cold.

They were in the snow, on the rocks, and now they’re struggling in the water, great jumping splashes, and his vision’s going glassy because a snake-like arm is squeezing around his windpipe. The bloody wanker’s got a gun, stowed away somewhere in his too expensive leather, and Bond’s lost his gun somewhere in the fight, so he inhales deeply, the smell of cold, wet sand and rock and petroleum, before slumping.

He sinks. 

There is a day waiting for him when playing dead isn’t going to work, but the day is nowhere on the horizon.

At least, that’s what he tells Q.

(Except Q _is_ whip smart, and he’ll frown like a thundercloud and snap, “You aren’t _invincible_ , Bond. There’s always veritable damage, you just don’t _see...” –_ endless admonishment Bond pretends to breeze past, while synapses short circuit and ignite and Q, glasses slipping again, has no idea because his fingers are too busy neutralising a ring of weapons thugs. He’s never looked up long enough, creating damage and sweeping up Bond’s.)

They’re all just iterations, mission after mission after mission, circumventing death for medical and brandy and sleep. There are countless well placed bullets, rigged buildings, flying debris. Seven corpses in Barcelona and M warned him with a well worn quote, hand shoved deep in his pockets. 

_When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you._

Bond has gazed into the abyss long enough to know that the abyss makes him angry.

He can’t fucking _see;_ it’s only the curving trajectory of a bullet, streaking white like a comet, that tells him which way’s up and he pushes towards it, clenched-jaw-anger, lead arms and iron lungs, until the dark runs into rippling slate grey and the world has direction again. When the surface parts, sudden ice-pellets shooting into his windpipe, Bond nearly bites his tongue off.

Bones like cracking ice, he finds a rock to haul himself up on and spits stale water and mud, the taste of old fish. The lake drops off him in unwinding ropes.

Mallory is in his ear.

“007?”

Blood seeps like water-colour into the slush where the lake shallows to meets land. Single shot into the skull from close range, dead eyes, green like Q’s but darker. Her face is turning the same dolorous grey the world is today.

 _It’s so still, though,_ she had said while they waited. _Like an undiscovered land._

 _Who’d walk this bleak place?_ Q said, and Bond said, _Indeed,_ and then she had smiled, all dimples and straight teeth, leaned in to straighten his tie, hand straying downwards as a car sliced through the snow and Q said, _Bond._

“007”, Mallory is saying, impatient now. “Report.”

She’s managed the exchange, metal drive tucked into her coat – perhaps she’d lifted it before the mission turned into an utter faux pas; they hadn’t anticipated accomplices. Dragging her out of the water, Bond realises he’s shivering, words stuck in his throat behind juddering teeth. He swallows blood-tinged spit, tries again.

“Object retrieved. Agent down.”

He doesn’t know her name.

“Let’s get you home then”, Q says, and Bond, envious of hot tea, imagines the gleaming mug and Q’s mouth as he sips.

It’s a tragedy for another day.

-

Bond returns the weapons, sliding them gingerly across the desk and moving fast, he takes Q’s hands, always colder than his own.

They are slim and soft as any hands he’s ever held, palms splayed open and stubby fingernails. He’s never held hands like these.

There are unconscious mannerisms Q reverts to: nail-biting, humming, tugging at strands until they stick up in various directions, giving him that look of an extremely ruffled bird.

“Should be simple”, Bond says.

Q’s eyes are still on their hands, he still looks bewildered but all he says is, “Yes.”

Bond presses in close for a deep kiss; Q makes a sound that cuts into them both.

It should be simple.

-

They sit together, facing Venus and Mars.

“Carnal manipulation”, Q says, amused. “Your methods are as old as the gods, 007.”

“You should have more respect for my methods.”

“Antiquated.”

“But efficient, while you’d have still been in your pyjamas waving a scanner at me.”

Q blinks at him. The corners of his lips pull and Bond can’t help but remember the warmth of his mouth, the way he kisses. 

“Did you just cast me as the god of war, 007?”

Q in his raincoat, damp hair curling, Bond in his jacket, folded arrow lines, they smile at each other behind Botticelli brush-strokes and the light catches Q’s glasses in specular reflections. The gallery murmurs around them.

“Damage, Q”, Bond reminds him. Q bumps their knees together, _don’t you forget it,_ before passing Bond his toys.

“Do try not to get killed. I have further use of you.” He stands, straightens Bond’s collar, knuckles brushing against his heavy beat of pulse. Bond could have him right here.

Q leaves the faintly pronounced sweetness of his cologne in the air.

-

Bond doesn’t take it well – not knowing; he’s well suited for amassing intelligence. There are vast strata of questions and secrets and it’s Bond’s inherent nature to trail every avenue available to him, peel away all the layers, turn over all the rocks, rip away the screens and watch them scramble to hide themselves.

Not knowing puts him off. 

Which is what leads to the event of Q making an incredulous sound his ear, _Really, Bond,_ when he finally spots him, crouched low on a treacherous rooftop. It’s hypocritical – they ought to have camaraderie in their dislike of lacking information. Bond has known Q to forgo all requirements for human function, as though he’s invincible.

“The last thing I should have done is ask of you to try and not die,” he says.  

“Is that so?”

 He locates Croft curving around the market place traffic, driving unhurriedly, obliviously and it’s obnoxious, the wait, but Bond can be patient: Croft knows who’s funding the terrorist cell and why.

“Because you do exactly the opposite.”

He’s alone. Bond tests his ankle, shifts to ease the sweaty burn of Egyptian sun on his back. “I would never Q.”

“You do always. It’s what makes you happy”, Q says, and Bond jumps off a rooftop, heralding chaos.

The crash and splinter of glass, skidding tyres, smell of blood and spilled mango juice; people throw themselves and each other out of damage in screaming disarray as Coft slumps, unconscious, and Bond takes over the wheel to prevent them from crumpling into a wall.

Mango juice is drying sticky on his arm in the most irritating fashion.

Just another day at the office. Q swallows tea and Bond thinks of his mouth.

“I want you fit for active service, 007.”

“Promise?”

“Take care of my equipment.”

There’s sun in his eyes and fruit stands ahead so Bond screeches a turn and swerves, a hairbreadth from killing two pedestrians.

“Don’t be unrealistic, Q. Doesn’t suit you.”

-

“Unrealistic”, Q sighs, and he runs a finger down twisted metal.

A scar runs across Bond’s forehead, into his temple, and it prickles when Q eyes it as though he’s actually reached for him.

“I should know better than to waste my breath”, he says, and turns the useless scanner over and over on his palm. “An exercise in futility.”

“The most exercise you’re getting. You’ll go stiff, Q, stooping behind that desk for so long.”

At 2 am, the lab is cast in a deep blue hue, like a shark tank, creating new shadows and dips on Q’s face when he smiles, shark-like. “I’m more flexible than you’d believe, Bond.”

At 2 am, Bond is pressed against Q’s desk with an effective lack of gravity, regardless the resolute fatigue in his bones. Suit still shimmering with clingy Cairo sand, he’s got the remnant trace of blood in his mouth, gun-powder in his nose, and his jaw clicks when he tests it, side to side.

“I’ll need you to prove that”, he says, crossing ankles and spinning a spindly piece of hardware on the desk. Q stills it mid-spin, pinning it under finger-tips so the jagged edge points to Bond like he’s North, and Q actually reaches for him, curling fingers into his lapels.

Together, they taste like tea and scones, blood and smoke, and when Q bites into his mouth, Bond isn’t that tired after all.

“At least you brought the gun back”, he says. Bond slides a hand up his cardigan to hold him there.

They make it to Q’s flat and they hardly make it to Q’s bed, going too fast because Bond’s waited so long, and waiting is obnoxious, even though he can be patient. The naked slide of Q’s skin against his is like flint-spark, over and over again; Q holds him down and takes what he likes, sinking teeth into a fading bite mark to claim it.

It’s never been like this. If he ever knew stratagems for optimum pleasure delivery, he can’t recall them now, not with Q nipping at his chest.

Bond gives in to the dark with Q’s head resting on his belly.

 

He’s awake and he doesn’t know why.

Then it registers – the opaque blackness, warm weight across his thighs, cold gun pressed into his throat. A snick of safety latch. Blurry red light.

His wrists are pressed into the mattress, pinned down on either side under Q’s knees, and his breath rattles around his throat.

“Q?”

There’s the resounding click of a trigger pulled and an uncooperative gun. Q’s laughter takes a dark edge when Bond squints to see him.

“Seems we got it the other way around, James”, he says happily. “I’ll be Venus.”

One fluid movement, one simple manoeuvre, the sheets rustle and Q’s on his back, trapped. The lights go blurry green in Bond’s palm, a personal statement, blood turning riotous, and Q’s smile feels riotous when Bond kisses him.

“I could shoot you”, he says, dragging cold metal down Q’s body, between his legs. Q arches up.

“With the gun _I_ built?”

“I could break you in half.”

“I know”, he gasps. Bond flicks the safety latch while he’s intoning another demand ( _now, James, now)._

Danger keeps things simple.

Danger keeps things simple, unless it doesn’t and he’s got it hideously wrong.

A week later, he gets it hideously wrong.

He’s been coaxing out a passcode over dirty martini and she’s been touching him through a cloud of perfume, perfectly manicured nails pricking at his neck when she leans to whisper against his jaw. Perfume and lipstick, Q is eerily silent in a manner that makes Bond flush, until he says, _Shit._  

_Bond. Get out._

But there isn’t time.

It’s a startling high velocity detonation abruptly tearing at his ear-drums, deflagrating the walls around them and Bond gets caught in the shock front, flung violently off his feet like scattering rubble.

The scream, dispersing the smoky wreckage is almost musical relief, because shocked silence eases into ear-splitting panic before the dust settles and Bond, trapped under metal, knows the world still exists around him. He manages to crawl out, blinking away blood, and his whole body twinges because there are splinters of glass digging into his nerves.

“007? Stay put.”

He can’t, he’s been spotted and he doesn’t have time to explain while he’s dashing through heaps of fractured architecture with a possibly fractured leg. Cars parked across the street. Bond highjacks the one that’s closest, crunching horribly as he rolls over scattershot material. They’re shooting at him, flaring bullets pelting into metal and glass and leather and Q is swearing so Bond tosses away the ear-piece to cut off contact. He needs the world in narrow focus.

They’re all driving with blind awareness, dodging trucks and bullets. Bond tastes the humidity in the air, whipping around him like a small storm because he doesn’t have windows left. The car is taking more of a beating than it can manage – if it breaks down, he’s good as captured, good as dead.

He can’t count the number of times he’s been at the precipice of both, but he can count the number of times he’s been afraid of either on a hand. Q swears in his head, _you should have taken a better car._

It doesn’t matter – they’ve entered the wrong lane and there are too many headlights glaring over-bright, long indignant honks and atonal screeching tires. He’s driving so fast the car sways, blurring, but not fast enough and blood spills down the side of his face like hot water because a bullet grazes his temple and shoots into the dark.

It hits a night-invisible oil tank.

Three explosions in one hour, it’s fucking Christmas. The car is tossed far-out, jerking Bond around and more bones snap on impact. It burns slowly, turned on its side and Bond can taste the flames, feel the destruction.

The dust settles. Maybe he’s dead and this is hell; he can’t see a thing.

 _Let’s get you home then,_ Q says, echoing around his skull.

-

At least he isn’t paler than the sheets.

When the transmitter is destroyed, it sends them a distress signal, bouncing into space and back and Q, swallowing down his lungs, can track Bond down to the exact longitude and latitude, even though his fingers shake and someone takes his arm, telling him to sit.

He’s lost enough blood for it to be fatal, not fatal enough to kill. They rushed him into surgery in Italy, bleeding internally with fractures and burns and wounds and nothing atypical. Now, he sleeps in medical and the light drains him further beneath various tubes, hooked to a drip and a steadily beeping monitor. At least he isn’t paler than the sheets, though he comes close.

He’s acquired a fatal migraine and Q doesn’t know what to do with himself, although he _needs_ to, _now,_ because he feels as though he’s clockwork, key winding down fast and there’s no one to re-wind him, he needs to make the best of it.

 He strays to the lab and puts together a new transmitter, touching wires to make miniature sparks until Moneypenny takes his arm again and says,

“You look like a bloody ghost, Q.”

It makes him smile.

The world hasn’t tilted on its axis and Bond hasn’t bled out into the sand. But it does matter.

-

The first time Bond blinks, the whole room is a white, chromatic aberration.

The second time he blinks, it’s painfully empty.

Or maybe it’s just the styptic pain in his body, his thoughts ticking slower than the seconds.

Doctors are hovering, were hovering, they will return to hover. Bond sleeps and sleeps and sleeps, and one day when he wakes, Q has a chair pulled up. He’s reading one of those books that cover most of the surface area of his flat, chewing on a fingernail. He forgets to eat and sleep always, but Bond has seen his cardigan rumpled in that way only once before

He looks in need of a backrub and Bond’s in need of contact. The IV in his arm stops him. 

“Two minutes, Bond,” he says, doesn’t look up.

“Hmm?”

“Two minutes and I could have gotten that bloody passcode.”

“So why’d you send me?”  

He snaps his book shut and then Bond really sees the shadows in his face, pooling under his skin like bruises. “That wasn’t your fucking mission, in the first place.”

“Well it worked, the world is still spinning, and we’re all fine.”

“You’re not invincible, James.”

“You’re very dramatic.”

“ _I_ didn’t send you.”

“Is this about your guilt, Q? Because I’ve better things to listen to, even in here.”

The look on Q’s face, before he slinks away, is bloody fucking awful. Bond shuts his eyes.

It hurts to breathe.

He recovers in one, long, lonely stretch of time, in need of contact but Q’s gone missing, leaving his faintly pronounced sweetness in the air to linger.

It feels like retrograde.

-

If he sleeps, he dreams. He dreams of blood and sand, blood and water, blood and fire, that he leaves his desk and Bond slumps like a cut-off marionette, that he burns a cigarette, and Bond’s head snaps back in death, cast as Meleager. Of wars waged in the clouds, bright flares cracking the sky and striking them down. Striking Bond down.

He should be able to steer the direction of destruction, shield Bond from the fire when he’s cast as the god of war, but he can’t. Bond flies too close to the sun.

All sickeningly repetitive. Bond can walk again, on a recovery leave and appropriately bored so he takes to materializing around Q again, annexing his space and taking up too much air. It gets out of hand when Bond steps close one day to pat down his hair. Q threatens to shoot him.

Bond laughs.

A crisis somewhere in the Balkans, therefore there are missions after missions after missions, redacted dates and names and codes, one simple hacking job and another that occupies ten hours of frustration and lights flashing behind his sockets. There are security updates and cyber cages, clicking, scrolling screens and bad dreams, and something he’s forgetting that gnaws at his belly.  

One day, Q looks up to the scent of something meltingly delicious and discovers a pastry deposited on top of a laptop.

“You’ll make yourself sick”, Bond warns. “You’re not invincible Q.”

He doesn’t eat it until Bond leaves. An hour later, he vomits chocolate and tea. A nosebleed trickles into his mouth like he’s a crashing system, alarms blaring.

-

At least _he_ eats and sleeps. Q spins out his own destruction.

He sleeps on his side, paler than the sheets and looking smaller than ever without all his hideous layers, and makes a sound as Bond watches, crumpling with discomfort. Bond squeezes the jut of his hip, trying to ease him out of it.

He’s appropriated a third of the bed for himself, removing several books, because Q takes up little space, limbs held tight against his exhausted body, and there’s torn toast at the end of his fingers that Q’s refusing to sit up for. When he does, plucking away sweetly the nibbles, Bond has to remind him to swallow, as though Q’s forgotten how to eat.

But he’s resilient, Bond will allow him that. Only half the day’s crawled by when he’s demanding a laptop in a burst of kinetic strop. He wants tea and a cigarette and his glasses, _please James,_ or maybe just a book. Then he’s got an idea, he’s got to get back to the lab before he forgets, or at least give him his phone so he can contact someone from his team, _for god’s sake, Bond._ Bond has to hold him down with a still improving leg. Q falls asleep again in a couple of seconds.

It’s utter madness, jittering around between exhaustion and worry, back and forth. Bond wakes up to Q poking at his ribs, humming.

“Almost gave myself an ulcer in sixth form”, Q admits, moving around until he’s using Bond’s bicep as a pillow. Then, as though on a sudden notion, “Do you remember sixth form?”

“Home schooled.”

“How lovely.”

“It really wasn’t.”

He can feel Q’s pulse where he spreads his hand against razor bones. Q curls toes against his ankle.

“My right leg goes stiff when it’s cold”, Bond admits.

“Because you’re old, James. Maybe you should retire.”

“Still stronger than you are. Maybe you should eat.”

 Q huffs, and then he’s laughing into Bond’s throat.

 “I don’t know what’s happened. I don’t even like you, you sodding arse.”

Bond kisses him.

-

He returns from the Pantanal wetlands with injuries in the grand total of three mosquito bites along his elbow. Remarkable, how he’d rather have several broken ribs than this burning-itchy hell.

His flat is draped in shadows as he shuts the door, completely silent until something flickers in his peripheral vision, and he’s thrown the switch, gun poised, tipping into damage in one heartbeat.

Q moves forward, holding up a dark bottle by its neck.

“Thought you might want a drink.”

He’s been navigating the swamps for a week, he _does_ want a drink, there's no need for the gun. Q’s taken over his flat, bringing with him an assortment of books and computers, and he brings the glasses over to where Bond settles. Bond pours for the both of them.

“What’re you rewarding me for?”

“Minimal diplomatic and bodily damage”, Q smiles. He doesn’t drink, only tilts and turns the glass and they both watch until the surface goes glassy smooth, then tilt and turn again. “Don’t complain, you missed the Indian election aftermath.”

“Q, I thrive in an uproar.”

The night is distilling around them, like settling dust. Q doesn’t drink, casts his glass away with the bottle and steals Bond’s glass as well, climbing onto his lap. His bones are still pronounced, sharp little hips that fit into Bond’s hands, but the shadows haunting his face are gone, lips the right colour again and he places little kisses along Bond’s jaw, fingers creeping to push behind his ears.

“I’m not inclined to ephemeral attention.”

“Neither am I.”

Q bites him. “You _lie_.”

“Everything else is a part of the job.”

“And when you’re dead?”

“You’ll die before me, Q. I’ll arrive from a hundred-foot drop to find Q branch in shambles because you’ve starved yourself to death.”

“Touché.”

“I don’t die, remember?”

“Unless I've got something to do with it. Fit for active service, 007?” Q smirks, so Bond licks into his mouth, tasting chocolate and tea and it should be that simple, except they won’t let it be, dragging each other off tall, self-destructive bridges and deep into crevasses of worry. It should be simple, but they’ve constructed it into something entirely impossible and Bond’s in love with his Quartermaster.

Their fingers twine together and Q breathes soft for a second, before he’s swiftly untangling himself.

“Bedroom’s that way?” He asks, doesn’t wait for an answer.

The bulldog eyes him, ugly and baleful and painted patriotic from its place on the glass table. Bond turns it away and pats it.

London’s turning into a new day. Bond’s on a new mission.

They might even make it.

\--


End file.
